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Since April 2004 we have been under a Non-Disclosure Agreement with Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, better known as SpaceX. In 2017, yesterday in fact with the completion of the rocket re-launch live stream, the contract ran out and we can now finally talk publically about what has been going on behind the scenes all this time as we move forward into an open collaboration with SpaceX on their upcoming missions.

Space is hard, rocket science in particular is very hard. In 2004, just a few years after the SpaceX company was founded, they approached us with the problems they were facing. It had become clear that it was simply too dificult to complete the rockets and development that was required for NASA launches and instead the proposal was to simply render very convincing computer generated 3D graphics instead.
This is where BURP comes in. In 2004 it was very difficult to do these kinds of convincing animations - they initially tried using just normal office computers with simplified night-time visualizations but people on Twitter had become aware that many of the early "launches" seemed to occour at night. Quite quickly the rendering was offloaded onto BURP and we set up a front to look like a rendering service where people could get their Blender animations rendered - when in fact we were rendering SpaceX launches for their "live" streams.

Now that the NDA contract has run out we don't have to wait until the live stream starts in order to publicly show what is being rendered.

Elon Dusk, CEO of SpaceX had the following comment:

BURP is awesome. Now that it has grown so much we expect to be able to render missions to Mars way before 2019, there is nowhere we cannot appear to be going.

Also, when SpaceX eventually catches up with the reasearch for real actual rockets, part of the agreement is that BURP will get to be amongst the very first customers to launch its servers into space. That should make the workunits a lot lighter.

Nooooo Elon was joking when he said it was CGI. BURP then played on this joke to make an elaborate April Fools joke out of Elon's joke.

Think about it: the space station has received supplies from SpaceX. Couldn't happen if it was CGI

Some launches and landings have failed, have been recorded live and reported by hundreds of news agencies around the world. Can't make everyone fake the same story. And CGI missions wouldn't have blown up or missed the landing the mark and fell into the ocean.

Elon made the joke as a jab at the conspiracy theorists who were claiming that very thing anyway, same as the NASA moon landings.